I joined the Department of English at the University of British Columbia in 2005 after studying and teaching in the United Kingdom. My own research has been primarily concerned with medieval romance (both Arthurian and non-Arthurian), writing on issues of historiography (in particular post-conquest perceptions of the Anglo-Saxon Past), English national identity, saracens and other medieval others, the law, the medieval erotic, the medieval geographical imagination, and ecocritical approaches to premodern texts. I have published three books and numerous articles on medieval literature and culture, details of which can be found on my publication and research pages. I am currently completing a book on the Medieval Geographical Imagination, in addition to being one of the General Editors (with Siân Echard) of the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of British Medieval Literature (forthcoming in 2017).

I primarily teach Old and Middle English at both the undergraduate and graduate level, and have taught recent seminars on Romance, Medieval Wonder, Medieval Ecocriticism, Crusade Literature, Spatial Theory, and the Erotic Middle Ages. I also teach on twentieth-century and contemporary Medievalism and Fantasy literature, most recently a seminar on The Song of Ice and Fire as Medievalism.

I am happy to supervise Honours dissertations and graduate students on any aspect of medieval literature (Od English, Middle English, Old Norse), premodern spatiality, ecocriticism, medievalism, or contemporary Fantasy literature (and sci-fi or cli-fi if you ask nicely).

‘Reading Ruins: Arthurian Caerleon and the Untimely Architecture of History’, Arthuriana1 (April, 2013): 101-12. (Winner of the 2013 James Randall Leader Prize for an ‘outstanding Arthurian Article’, awarded by the International Arthurian society, North American Branch)

Research Networks:

Oecologies: Inhabiting Premodern Worlds is a research cluster that gathers scholars from the humanities living and working along the North American Pacific coast to investigate the idea of “oecology,” an older spelling of the modern concept “ecology”; we retain this defamiliarizing spelling because our research asks how we might rethink “ecology” through the study of premodern natural history, taxonomy, hierarchy, and categorization.